Bartosz Kowalczyk was at an age where sitting in a folding chair at Plac Nowy, calling out to stumbling tourists, had long since lost its excitement. Or maybe he just felt that way because it was a Friday morning, and that was when pigeon breeders and buyers swarmed the market, bringing trails of feathers and cooing so shrill it made his vision fuzzy.
Even though the pigeons and the people who came along with them were always cleared out by 9, the shit-smell of them coated the market all day. Bartosz always wore his oldest clothes on Fridays. It may have led to fewer sales, but he didn’t care. No matter how often he washed the clothes he wore on pigeon days, the dusty scent of the birds never seemed to go away.
Drumming his fingers on his table—a perfectly respectable one, with a blue tablecloth and no feathers—he debated skipping out on future Fridays completely. There had been some tension anyway, with the mayor talking about banning the sale of Lucky Jews from Kraków. Bartosz was sure it would blow over; once the initial outrage settled, it always did. But maybe it wouldn’t hurt to take a break.
He had enough money to live off of, what with his wife’s life insurance and the money they had saved for children that had never come. Bartosz drummed his fingers against the table again, hard enough that the closest Lucky Jew fell over with a soft wooden thud. He picked it up, ran his middle finger over the rough edges of the Jew’s cap, its beard, its grabbing hands that clung to its gray money bag.
Bartosz would not take a small break. He would think of a false reason, later, why he would choose to go to Plac Nowy, day after day. The real reason, though, the one that he only admitted to himself in the deepest cavern of his heart, was that a day at the market, even one filled with bird shit, was better than sitting at home, knowing that he was alone, knowing that he always would be.
But at the market he peddled stories and figurines, snatching coins out of pockets with a silver tongue that worked well in English, but even better in Polish. It was always a special sort of sale when it was to one of his own people, though those were becoming few and far between these days. The Polish people seemed to be more rational now, less likely to believe in their own folktales.
Bartosz blamed the Pandemic. Leon, another seller of Lucky Jews in the market, blamed the always-gray skies and politically-correct Americans and Morawiecki. Bartosz wasn’t sure what the prime minister had to do with anything, but he didn’t question Leon’s logic. He had learned that it was better not to, unless you wanted to be on the receiving end of a rant that lasted until long after the sun had set.
Bartosz drummed his fingers against the table. The market was starting to fill up, but people seemed to be skimming their eyes past him with hardly a second glance. He leaned back in his chair, crossing his arms. And then out of the corner of his eye he saw them: a man with an oversized purple backpack and a woman grabbing onto a shifty-looking child, seemingly trying to stop him from running every which way.
He smiled. As the family came closer he straightened up, placed some of the Lucky Jews holding the gold coins closer to the front of his display. Children tended to like shiny things. They were only a few tables away from Bartosz, but it took a long time for them to get to him. The man stopped at every single stall, examining old watches and knickknacks with a single-minded fervor. The woman merely attempted to keep the child near her, and as they came closer, he could hear her admonishing him.
She was speaking in English, and Bartosz was almost certain that her accent was American. He prided himself on his skill of identifying accents, languages. Years as a vendor had allowed for him to hone his abilities. They arrived at his table, and Bartosz looked up at them, smiling gently.
“Dzień dobry,” the man said, clunky and awkward in his pronunciation.
“Dzień dobry,” Bartosz said back. And then, “You are American, yes?”
The man gave a slightly embarrassed nod as the woman laughed behind him, still holding on to her child’s arm.
“Yeah,” she said, nudging at the man. “I wonder why they can always tell.” Then she pulled the child closer. “C’mon Jamie, don’t you wanna look at these? They’re pretty cool, huh?” Jamie shrugged, but his eyes flicked to the gold coins that the figurines held.
“My father,” Bartosz said, looking at Jamie even though he didn’t seem to be paying attention, “had a friend named Shmuel, probably when he was about as old as you. He grew up with him, and cared for him very much. But Shmuel disappeared when my father was young. It was so sad for my father. He talked always of his friend Shmuel, but he never heard from him again. And so! In his memory, my little Shmuels. I carve them myself, just as my father taught me.”
His father hadn’t taught him a single thing.
His mother had been the one who told him of the thick black smoke that billowed out of unseen chimneys. That smelled of death. He would get into those gorier details sometimes with tourists like this American man. They tended to like that. But he had learned from experience that they didn’t tend to approve of talking about Nazis in front of their children, so for this boy, he made the story into something softer.
“Wow, what an interesting story,” the woman said, smiling as Jamie and her husband pored over the Lucky Jews. Jamie traced one of the gold coins with his fingernail. “You want that one, Jamie?”
He nodded and grabbed the Lucky Jew from the table.
“How much?” the woman asked.
“120 złotych,” Bartosz said, and the woman’s smile became slightly fixed.
She looked at her husband. “It is handmade,” the man said, shrugging. He gave her a crooked grin. “And like you said, it’s vacation.” The woman returned his smile with a slightly exasperated one before rolling her eyes and handing over the money. Bartosz’s heart seized in his chest.
They disappeared into the crowd, Jamie’s eyes on his new toy as his mother dragged him away. The rest of the day progressed in much of the same way, Bartosz scoping out the crowd, predicting and storytelling and guessing accents. No different, in other words, than any other day for him. Almost routine.
For the Lucky Jew he had made the night before, however, a Lucky Jew by the name of Shmuel, as they were all named, this day at Plac Nowy was anything but routine. In fact, it was the most incredible day he had ever had. This wasn’t saying much, as it was the only day he had experienced. This Shmuel was sure, though, that if he had experienced other days, he would still think that this day was incredible.
Shmuel loved the excited clatter of the marketplace, the colored tablecloths, the smells of spice and warm bread that wafted from somewhere out of his sight. He even liked the cooing of the birds that had overtaken the market in the early morning, the ones that his Creator muttered angrily about until they vacated.
Shmuel’s only wish was that he could walk from stall to stall, take in everything. But he was unfortunately a wooden figurine, and so he couldn’t even move his eyes from their fixed position. He didn’t mind being what he was too much though, since his Creator had said that he was magic, that he would bring wealth and good fortune.
He liked the idea of being lucky, of being magic. He didn’t feel like he was magic, but he assumed that that part would begin to show itself once someone took him home. As the day went on, though, he was beginning to doubt that it would happen at all. The Shmuels surrounding him continued to be picked up, manhandled, and while he was glad that he was not the one being touched by strange-smelling hands, he felt an odd little twinge in the hollow that he thought of as his stomach each time he was passed over.
His second wish was born out of this twinge. He wanted to be chosen. He wanted to be special, to be magic. Shmuel was sure that while he was still at Plac Nowy, he wouldn’t be. As the sun began to dim, Shmuel wondered how much longer people would be able to see the Creator’s booth.
Shmuel shook as the Creator drummed his fingers against the table, humming an indecipherable melody. He seemed to be in a better mood now, far better than the one he was in this morning when he was muttering about pigeons and hitting the table so hard that he had knocked Shmuel over completely.
“Ah, young lady! Looking for some luck?” He was speaking in Polish now, and Shmuel had noticed that it came far more naturally to him than the English he had used with tourists. A moment later a woman sidled into Shmuel’s view, her expression unsure, her face framed by strands of red hair that had fallen out of her bun.
“Just one,” she said, her voice firm, lower than Shmuel had thought it would be.
“Yes, yes,” the Creator replied. “Only 80 złotych!”
The woman did not meet the Creator’s gaze. She did not even acknowledge that he had spoken. She brushed her fingers over the remaining Shmuels, her chipped nails lightly hitting the top of Shmuel’s black cap. And then she picked Shmuel up. A wave of nausea swooped over him as she brought him close to her face, to her brown eyes, flecked with spots of gold. The cool of her breath surrounded him, smelling of mint and marjoram.
“This one,” she said, bringing him down to the table again before gripping him in her fingers, leaving him unable to see. “I want this one.”
“80 złotych.”
The woman’s fingers began to release Shmuel, and he could see her start to back up slightly.
“Come now, 80 złotych is a deal! Each are handcrafted. And the money you make from a little Shmuel far outweighs the price you pay. Everyone comes back to me, they say that the Jew, it changes their life. Believe me! You will come back too, I know it.”
“It works?” Her voice was softer now, a hint of desperation edging into it, her fingers curling again around Shmuel.
“It works.” The Creator paused. “All you have to do is turn the Jew upside down every Saturday and shake it, make sure the money returns to the house it belongs to. Every Saturday, and the end of every year. It never fails.”
The woman sighed. She rummaged in her bag with the hand that wasn’t gripping tight to Shmuel, pulling out 80 złotych and placing it into the Creator’s outstretched hand. Shmuel expected to be stuffed in the bag as well, but the woman kept a tight grip on him, continuing to obscure his vision.
He became almost hypnotized by the routine swaying of her arm, by the way the breath of wind passed by him, and the rest of the woman’s walk to her home occurred for Shmuel in a daze. He didn’t think that it was too long, though, before she was swinging open the door to a home that was dim and sweet-smelling and warm in a way that he had never felt before.
The Creator’s fingers had been cold. So had the table and the peering eyes of the tourists and the wind that hit him as the woman walked. But this home, it was warm. This home was truly a home. Shmuel hadn’t understood the meaning of the word before. But he felt a certain kinship to this place, to the red-headed woman. She had chosen him. Shmuel wondered if this was the magic, working already.
The woman sighed, and Shmuel’s heart dropped into the bottom of his stomach as she placed him on the ground and took off her shoes and hung up her coat. Shmuel watched the bottom of the coat stand waver as the woman left his line of sight, her footsteps soft.
There was a slight clatter and then a crackling hiss. The house became warmer still. The woman came back, picking him up, running her fingers over the edges of his beard.
“Filip will hate you,” the woman said. “Kurwa, Filip will hate you.” Her thumb rested on his oblong nose. She sighed again. He couldn’t tell if the woman thought that this unknown Filip would hate her, or Shmuel himself. But she had brought Shmuel to her home, to her beautiful warm home. He couldn’t imagine anyone having hatred for someone so kind.
Her feet floated over carpet until she reached a brown and square and almost too clean couch. She placed him on the coffee table in front of it and then sat down, pulling her legs underneath her.
“My name is Hanna.”
She looked at Shmuel, straight into his drooping eyes. She looked down. Her hands pulled at the clip holding her hair back until it fell in soft waves over her face. Shmuel wished he could reach out, that he could touch it.
“You will help me, won’t you?” As Hanna spoke, wetness curled onto her eyelashes.
Shmuel strained to reach out to her, to drop his bag and offer a comforting hand. But he couldn’t move, no matter how hard he tried. His eyes always shifty, his cheekbones left gaunt, his body hunched around the bag he would never be able to let go of.
There was a long creak, one that replaced the answer that Shmuel couldn’t give. She jumped up, and he was left staring at the divot in the couch slowly rising, a divot that Hanna had created when she sat down.
“Hanna.” This voice was more nasal, deeper.
“Filip. You’re back early.”
“Yes.”
There was a silence, and even Shmuel, who had only been created for one day, knew that it was an uncomfortable one.
“I went to Plac Nowy today,” Hanna said. Shmuel could hear shuffling, uneven digs into the floor that were so different from Hanna’s gentle steps.
“Oh?”
“We had run out of marjoram.”
“You braved the tourists just to get marjoram?”
“I bought a Lucky Jew, too.”
“Really?” Filip said, his voice lilting into a tease. “I thought your mother was the one who believed in old wives’ tales.”
“Don’t laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing.” The teasing lilt was gone. “Hanna, what—”
“You know about Zofia and her husband. Their money problems. Two months ago, they were drowning. And now? All of that, gone.”
“The money?”
“The problems. Do not laugh at me.”
“I’m not laughing!”
“In your head, you are laughing. I can see it in your eyes.”
“Ukochany, of course you’re right. You’re right. You know me so well.”
“I can’t even have a conversation with you,” Hanna said, exasperation creeping into her tone. Shmuel decided that he didn’t like Filip very much. He made Hanna unhappy.
“I’m sorry, alright? Hanna, I’m sorry.” There was a heavy pause. “Hanna, Hanna, Hanna. Come on, I’ll fix this, with the money. You know I always do.”
“How? I don’t—I don’t even know what you do at work. And the gambling—Filip, I know you haven’t stopped. And I know it’s hard. We can—we can go back to the counselor, together—”
“I’m not going back to that kawałek gówna—”
“He was perfectly—”
“Of course you think he was perfect.”
The silence that followed made Shmuel wish even more fervently that he had the ability to walk out of the room.
And then Hanna spoke, the chill gone, the exasperation gone. “Filip, just—let me put it in your study here. I know you don’t believe in it, but just—just humor me. Please.”
“Fine.” Shmuel heard those digging footprints coming closer, and then a clammy hand wrapped around him. “Fine. The Żyd will go in my study. I’ll put it there now, see? And that,” he muttered under his breath, “will fix everything, I’m sure.”
Hanna said something from the other room, but Shmuel couldn’t hear it, too focused on trying to see where he was going through Filip’s grip. It was a futile attempt though, because all he could see were long, lean, angry legs.
Filip placed Shmuel unceremoniously down on some flat surface before leaving him, slamming the door as she left. Shmuel rattled. The lights were off, so Shmuel couldn’t see even a centymetr in front of him. If he could shiver, he would’ve. Shmuel wished he could call out to Hanna. He wished he could ask her to trace his beard again. He would have even been okay with a child’s wet fingers. Shmuel had never felt so alone.
Maybe he would have felt a bit better if he knew that, in the other room, Hanna felt just as alone, even though Filip was there. Maybe they both would have felt better. There is, of course, the issue that even if they knew, they would be unable to speak to each other regardless. Hanna was human, and Shmuel was a figurine made out of wood. In another world, perhaps they could have comforted each other.
In this world, they couldn’t. But if they could, maybe Hanna would tell Shmuel about how, recently, she had found herself confused, unable to remember how Filip had slotted so firmly into her life. How she had married him. How she remembered that she had thought he was beautiful, once, though she had never told him that. Filip wouldn’t have liked to be called beautiful. She had called him handsome instead.
He really had been beautiful, though, with his hollowed-out cheekbones and soft hair and long lashes and lean muscles. Filip still had those lashes, but his cheekbones looked gaunt, too large for his face now that he was balding. His skin was stretched thin with the beginnings of wrinkles. His muscles were gone now, and Hanna wondered if they were ever even there in the first place, or just implied under the baggy sweaters he used to wear.
Whether the muscles were there or not, Hanna had never thought of Filip as weak. But now, the word hovered in her throat every time she saw him. Hanna kept that word back, though, even in the worst of their fights.
She also didn’t speak the source of so much of Filip’s shame, the fact that her parents had given them this house, that they were the only reason he even had a study at all. She kept those things inside, and their marriage only wobbled precariously on the precipice of being ‘not fine,’ instead of falling off it.
The night that Shmuel came to live in Filip’s study, Hanna went to bed and barely slept. Filip went to the same bed, but the two weren’t there together, not really. Hanna began to think again of how beautiful Filip used to be, and of children that would be just as beautiful. Filip thought of the thing that made children, and how Hanna was still beautiful, even if she had turned into something of a bitch.
But Filip wasn’t really in the mood for children, and Hanna wasn’t in the mood for making them, so they stayed silent and avoided the argument that would come with either of them voicing their desires. They had argued enough for today. That, at least, they silently agreed upon.
When Hanna opened her eyes the next morning, Filip was already gone. She hadn’t heard him leave for work. She shut her eyes tightly, pulling the covers around her so that none of the chill of the morning touched her skin. There was an empty ache in her stomach, but she wasn’t sure if she was ready to fill it.
When she was still working, she and Filip would spend the mornings together. They were sluggish mornings, and they all blurred together now. But she could remember basking in the rays of sun that broke through the blue curtains in their kitchen, letting them wake her up. Filip always made the both of them coffee.
Hanna ignored the ache in her stomach. She grabbed her laptop off her bedside table, planning to scroll through job openings. The hospital she used to work at would take her back quicker than a heartbeat. So many places would. But every time she opened a new application, her skin started to feel hot and tight, and her old eye twitch began to act up again.
There had just been so much death. She had thought that she would be able to handle it. While studying to be a nurse, she had been secretly excited, in a way, to hold a person’s life in her hands. But then she had held a life, many lives, and they had slipped through her fingers so quickly that it felt as if they had never been there to begin with.
Rationally, Hanna knew that it was not only she that held them, and that COVID had wrested lives out of the most experienced nurses and doctors’ hands. But in spite of that knowing, she couldn’t bring herself to even touch her old scrubs. She sighed, shutting her laptop.
She would look through the postings later. She had things to do around the house today anyway. Hanna slipped out of bed. She ate. She dusted the house, even though it didn’t really need to be dusted. She vacuumed. She thought of calling some of her old friends from university but thought better of it. She put in some laundry and then ate again.
She sat and she stared at the Lucky Jew in Filip’s office, picking at the black paint of its coat. Maybe it had been stupid, buying it. But she had always loved the Lucky Jew that her father had in his office. Hanna and her older sister had taken turns shaking it out each week. They had had to make a chart about whose turn it was because they could never agree on who had done it the week before.
Hanna would sit with their Lucky Jew when her dad was at work, would tell it about her day, worried that it would be lonely, sitting there all by itself. She had loved it so much that, when meeting a real Jew, one of her father’s coworkers that he had invited to dinner, she had been desperately disappointed.
“He doesn’t look right,” she had said to her father, later that night, nose wrinkled.
“What do you mean, my pszczółko?” he had asked, pulling her into his lap.
“The Jew,” she whispered.
“Hmm?”
“His nose,” she said, tracing her own absentmindedly, “it was maleńki, so tiny. And he was wearing regular clothes.”
Her father had laughed then. Hanna remembered the sound less than she could remember the way it felt in the shake of his stomach. “Don’t worry pszczółko,” he had said. “He may look different but we still have to shake him for coins.”
Hanna hadn’t been sure how someone would go about shaking this Jew; he was very tall, and you would have to be even taller and also very strong to be able to get him by his ankles. If anyone could do it, though, she was sure that her father could.
But she had never seen this shaking, just as she had never seen that Jew again, or any other Jew, for that matter. Lucky Jews seemed to be far more common in Poland than any real ones, so she could never confirm if every Jew just looked like every other person, or if the one she had met was some sort of fluke.
She had never thought about it very much at all, really, but she had been thinking a lot more about a lot of things lately. She had the time. Her eye gave an almost imperceptible twitch. She had more time than she had ever had in her life, and she found that she hated it.
Hanna found herself hating a lot of things recently, so time wasn’t anything special. Feeling hate was far better than feeling nothing, better than feeling that empty ache that she always seemed to wake up with now.
She curled her hate around this emptiness, able to come up with new things to hate each day. The exorbitant price of the Lucky Jew that she was now wrapping her fingers around. The singular, scraggly hair that had been growing under Filip’s chin that he had apparently missed while shaving. How she had believed him when he said that he would be able to provide for them.
Hanna dug her nails into the Lucky Jew, taking it with her as she walked out of Filip’s office. She set it down on the coffee table, just as she had yesterday. Then she busied herself with setting up the fireplace, a habit she had gotten into when she quit her job. She had always run cold. This helped.
Just as she had finished lighting the kindling with an old newspaper, she heard the creak of the door. Filip. Early again. Even earlier than yesterday. She pretended to still be busy with the fire.
“Hanna.”
“Filip.”
“Why are you back so early?”
He didn’t answer for a moment too long and Hanna looked at him for the first time since he had come in. His jaw was clenched and he looked away as her eyes met his, mouth slightly agape, as if he had been about to say something, but had forgotten just as the words had begun to prickle at his tongue.
“What happened?”
Filip turned away, walking to the too-clean couch. Hanna followed. He sat down, giving a bitter laugh at the Lucky Jew that stared back at him. Hanna could feel her face start to heat and she wasn’t sure if it was from anger or embarrassment or something else entirely. She stayed standing, facing him.
“What ha—”
He gestured at the Lucky Jew. “Let’s just say that the Żyd didn’t do its job.”
“What did you do?”
“You believe in folktales until you can blame me again,” Filip said, his voice flat. He laughed unhappily. “That makes sense.”
Hanna didn’t know what to say. She found that she came up with the best responses to him only when she was alone. She focused her eyes on that awful chin hair. She curled her tongue around the word ‘weak’ but didn’t let it topple out of her.
She opened her mouth to say something, anything, but Filip beat her to it.
“I’m trying to be understanding. I’m trying. But you sit here all day, doing nothing. The one time you go out you buy a Lucky Jew as if that—”
“You promised me that you could provide for us while I figured this out. You promised,” Hanna whispered, her voice breaking on that final promise.
Filip looked down, took a heavy breath. He grabbed the Lucky Jew off the table and rolled it roughly with his fingers. “Don’t fucking cry right now. Please can we talk about this without you fucking crying.” He stood up, beginning to pace, the Lucky Jew still rolling helplessly in his grasp.
“I—”
“I’ve had an awful day, Hanna. The worst. And you immediately ask me what I did wrong, what I’ve done…” He kept talking, and Hanna tried to keep listening, but the only thing she could focus on was the wooden figurine clutched in Filip’s fingers.
He gave a particularly abrupt motion with his left hand and the Lucky Jew slipped ever so slightly and the only thing that Hanna could think was of its gaunt face becoming nothing more than broken pieces on the floor and—
“Careful!”
Filip stopped his pacing and knit his eyebrows together, shocked out of his anger. The shock slipped into cool disbelief as he realized what Hanna was looking at. “You’re not even listening to me.”
“Filip—”
“You’re not even listening to me. And you care about this—this pieprzony Żydek more than you trust me. You—you—” His face was becoming red now, and the words came out of his mouth in louder and louder gasps until he couldn’t say anything at all.
Hanna felt sick.
Filip’s face contorted into a grimacing smile and he strode to the fire. With a surety in his movements that Hanna wasn’t used to, he dropped the Lucky Jew into it.
There was a moment of deathly silence which was broken by a wailing cry. At first, Hanna was sure that it was coming from the fire. She then realized that it was her own.
Being burned alive hurts. The Lucky Jew, or Shmuel, as he called himself, found that out rather quickly. As Shmuel burned, he could feel the whole of himself cracking, deforming, buckling. He wished he could cry out at the awful heat of it, but he couldn’t. So he took Hanna’s cry instead. He took her cry and he let it coat every part of him, let it fill his ears so he couldn’t hear the satisfied hiss of the fire as it ate him up: his gripping hands, his shifting eyes, his too-big nose.
In his last, flickering moments, he wondered if anyone would remember him.
~o~
Julia Grunes is a graduate of SUNY Geneseo, with a BA in psychology and English with a concentration in creative writing. She has previously been published in Gandy Dancer and Iris Magazine. Currently, Julia is teaching English in Spain through a Fulbright scholarship.
Judge Clare found Shmuel, the Lucky Jew “an unusual narrative with an unexpected point of view, a stifling and uncomfortable read.’
Designed and Maintained by Fabula Press